Overview of all pages with the tag #blues

Killing Floor • Part 3

The sliding sixth riff

Posted on March 5, 2020 at 16:42 | 4 minutes | 675 words | Rex Walters

Okay, here’s the third and final chapter of the Killing Floor lesson. This is about the main rhythm guitar riff that Hubert Sumlin plays throughout.

It uses a trick mostly associated with Steve Cropper (think “Soul Man” by Sam and Dave): sliding sixths. (Though I think Killing Floor pre-dates Soul Man by a few years.)

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blues repertoire

Killing Floor by Howlin' Wolf • Pt2

Yet more info on this classic song

Posted on March 5, 2020 at 11:49 | 2 minutes | 251 words | Rex Walters

Okay, let’s finish off the rest of this classic song. First up is the intro, which uses a pretty cool dom7 voicing on the top four strings.

As before, I’m documenting the song in the key of G (though it’s played in A on the record).

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blues repertoire

Killing Floor by Howlin' Wolf

Way too much detail about a classic song

Posted on February 29, 2020 at 20:24 | 3 minutes | 541 words | Rex Walters

This post is about a blues classic: the song “Killing Floor” by Howlin' Wolf, with Hubert Sumlin on guitar. You simply cannot listen to this song too many times: The song has been covered by pretty much everyone, including Jimi Hendrix. Led Zeppelin was obviously influenced by the song when they created The Lemon Song. They even paid Howlin’ Wolf $45K after they were sued, but nobody knows how much Arc Music (owners of the rights) nor the lawyers made. [Read More]

blues repertoire

Blues Comping

Applying 4-string dom7 shapes

Posted on February 22, 2020 at 18:54 | 6 minutes | 1249 words | Rex Walters

Now that I have sooooo many posts on this blog about soloing and scales, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that you’ll spend most of your time playing rhythm using chords. It’s also true that you can’t really put together a coherent solo unless you can instantly and effortlessly find the chord tones of the underlying harmony. Put simply: rhythm and chords are even more important than scales and solos. [Read More]

theory blues

Four String Blues

Comping and fretboard visualization

Posted on February 21, 2020 at 16:07 | 5 minutes | 886 words | Rex Walters

When soloing or playing with a band, it’s often helpful to avoid the lowest two strings. Those lower registers are where the bass player and the rest of the band (or at least the left hand of the keyboardist) tend to hang out. The blues uses dominant seventh chords (with extensions and alterations) almost exclusively. Just as with triads, it’s useful to spend a lot of time with seventh chords that only use the top four strings. [Read More]

theory blues

Beginner Blues

The two most fundamentally important things to playing blues

Posted on February 28, 2019 at 11:49 | 4 minutes | 830 words | Rex Walters

Contrary to what I thought when I first started, the blues are far from simple! Even though the blues uses just three chords, the reasons behind them all being dom7 chords, for example are pretty complex. Things really get interesting when people like Brian Wilson or Ornette Coleman get involved. Still, a 12-bar blues almost always follows roughly the same chord changes. It usually moves to the IV chord in bar 4, for example, then back to the I in bar 6, and has some sort of turnaround in the last four bars. [Read More]

blues repertoire